Story Highlights

It may not be as cool as watching the Packers eclipse the Seahawks, but Sunday night’s show promises to be pretty darn cool, too.

Shortly after 8 p.m., go outside. Look up. If the sky is clear, over the next four hours you'll be able to watch a full lunar eclipse. That's the kind you can look right at without going blind, so give it a try.

Total lunar eclipses are uncommon, but at least two factors will make this one rarer. First of all, it’s a harvest moon — so named because it’s the full moon that is closest to the start of fall, which was Wednesday.

That, by itself, doesn’t affect the moon’s appearance, but this one also happens to be a “super” moon. That’s a full moon that appears a tad larger than normal because it has swung as close to the earth as its orbit allows. That’s the moon at “perigee” — PAIR-uh-jee — if you want to impress your friends. Most often when the moon is at perigee, it’s not fully lit, but when it is, that’s pretty super, because it’s roughly 14 percent bigger than normal.

So a super moon falling fully into the earth’s shadow — that’s a lunar eclipse, which you also can call a syzygy (SISS-i-gee) to impress your friends and solve crossword puzzles — is a rare thing. It’s happened only five times since 1900, most recently in 1982, and it won’t happen again until 2033.

A perigee-syzygy of a harvest moon is rarer. So rare, in fact, that Google couldn’t help me find out when it’s ever happened.

You can bet the folks at the Neville Public Museum Astronomical Society will be out there looking at it.

“We might just gather at the house,” longtime member Gary Baier said. “You can just go out in your driveway and look. You don’t need to go out of the city, because the moon is so bright, even in the city, this will be very spectacular.”

Some members of the club might head out to the private Parmetier Observatory in Luxemburg, because watching a total lunar eclipse through a telescope or even binoculars can be especially interesting, Baier said.

Because the full moon goes dim during the peak of the eclipse, it becomes easier to look at through lenses, and you can better see craters and other interesting features on the moonscape, he said.

“Every eclipse is different,” Baier sad. “Sometimes it’s more red, sometimes it’s more like a copper penny, depending on the light. And it’s fun to try to get photos, because you never know exactly what you’ll get.”

You can join the club for $20. Plenty of time between now and the eclipse. Members can borrow from the club’s stash of telescopes and do some viewing from their backyards.

Lunar eclipses have limited scientific value. Climatologists, for example, like to use them to gauge things about the clarity of the earth’s atmosphere. But astronomer-hobbyists like Baier just like the chance to see something different in the sky.

As a physics and math teacher at Green Bay East High School, Baier plans to encourage his students to get out and take a look.

“The worst thing that can happen is it’ll get cloudy and you’ll lose a little bit of sleep for nothing,” he said.

It’s worth taking a chance, because the next visible total lunar eclipse won’t happen until 2018, he said.

— psrubas@pressgazettemedia.com and follow him on Twitter@PGpaulsrubas.

It’s show time

8:07 p.m.: The eclipse begins with what is called a partial umbral eclipse. That’s the moon moving into a faint portion of the earth’s shadow.

9:11 p.m.: The real show starts now, as the moon starts sliding into the darkest part of the earth’s shadow.

9:47 p.m.: The moon will be entirely shadowed — still visible, but now an eerie, reddish color. Now’s the time to start sacrificing stuff and praying to the gods to bring your moon back.

10:23 p.m.: The moon will have moved out of the main portion of the shadow and back into that fainter portion. Early risers can give up and go to bed.

12:22 a.m.: Time to pack up the lawn chair, load the empties into a garbage bag and head home — or find a different excuse to party.